Billy Graham Center
Archives

Collection 299- Ruth Margaret (Hatcher) Thomas. T2 Transcript.

This is a complete and accurate transcript of the tape of the second part and
last part of the oral history interview of Mrs. Ruth Thomas (CN 299, T2) in the
Archives of the Billy Graham Center. No spoken words have been omitted, except
for any non-English phrases which could not be understood by the transcribers.
Foreign terms which are not commonly understood appear in italics. In very few
cases words were too unclear to be distinguished. If the transcriber was not completely
sure of having gotten what the speaker said, "[?]" was inserted after
the word or phrase in question. If the speech was inaudible or indistinguishable,
"[unclear]" was inserted. Grunts and verbal hesitations such as "ah"
or "um" were usually omitted. The transcribers have not attempted to
phonetically replicate English dialects but have instead entered the standard
English word the speaker was expressing.

Chinese place names are spelled in the transcript in the old or new transliteration
form according to how the speaker pronounced them. Thus, "Peking"
is used instead of "Beijing," if that is how the interviewee pronounced
it. Chinese terms and phrases which would be understood were spelled as they
were pronounced with some attempt made to identify the accepted transliteration
form to which it corresponds.

Readers should remember that this is a transcript of spoken English, which
follows a different rhythm and rule than written English.

... Three dots indicate an interruption or break in the train of thought within
the sentence on the part of the speaker.

.... Four dots indicate what the transcriber believes to be the end of an
incomplete sentence.

( ) Words in parentheses are asides made by the speaker.

[ ] Words in brackets are comments by the transcriber.

This transcript was made by Bob Shuster and Kirk Haywood and was completed
in September 2007.

Collection 299, tape T2. Interview of Ruth Margaret (Hatcher) Thomas by Paul
Ericksen on March 6, 1985. Her husband Howard was also in the room and occasionally
spoke.

[Note: Throughout this interview there are references to Howard Thomas’
interviews in Collection 298.]

ERICKSEN: When I was talking with your husband earlier, I got a feel for the
programs that were set up in the area. How did the two of you work together?
Did you divide responsibilities, did you work together on things?

THOMAS: When Tom went touring to the other villages, I went with him always,
and any medical work that needed to be done at those particular times, I did.
But if I needed an assistant, he was my (what we used to call in the hospital)
my “dirty” nurse, against “sterile” nurse. And he would
help in setting up equipment, and getting patients in, and so on. He was particularly
helpful when we were doing the anti-opium campaigns (or taking the people off
opium), as well as the anti-malarial campaigns. And he would get the people
all primed, all hyped as it were, for the treatment. Particularly in the treatment
of...of...taking people off the opium habit. It was a very crude treatment.
We put what they call a Consardi’s [sp?] plaster on the chest. First....
I must back up on this. To get the patient ready, we would give them a large
dose of magnesium sulphate. That’s Epsom salts. Somehow or other, this
seemed to facilitate the treatment. And he would get this all mixed up, and
then sell the patient to how [chuckles] how good this was going to be. And they
would sip it, you know, and you don’t sip mag salts, you drink it down
in a gulp, but they did, and they’d say “Oh, this is such good medicine.”
And drink it. Then he would clean the place on the chest where I was going to
do this, and then I’d put the plaster on. Then this raises a blister underneath
this plaster, and I would go in antiseptically, and remove the fluid. Then he’d
get the patient turned over, and I would inject this in the buttocks. But you
do it, you know, with a big, long needle. And he had to, again, talk them up,
and get them all hyped to take this, and he’d say, “Now, don’t
cry, don’t yell out, because if you do, it’s only going to...you’re
only going to feel this prick.” Well, it’s a little bit more than
that, because it’s like...rather caustic. But if you got it so that the
first one didn’t yell, nobody else dared, because he’d lose face,
the community members would lose face. So Tom would get these...help me in this
respect. And we had a...quite a high rate of success on this. But my theory
was “No sense in taking them off if you don’t cure or help them
with what caused them to take it in the first place.” And many of them
had...I really believe they were ulcers, stomach ulcers, because of the very
hot, hot food they ate. And if they took it for pain for that, unless you cured
the ulcers, taking them off the habit isn’t going to keep them off the
habit very long. And so it was a rather complicated procedure, in its totality,
not the individual steps, but in what you were trying to accomplish, was rather
complex.

ERICKSEN: How widespread was the opium use in the area?

THOMAS: Well, it depended on how much the people could pay for, but they got
to the place where they would even use the residue, the ashes, from the smoking
of the opium, which made it more potent, I think. And, now, in our immediate
village, nobody smoked opium. I think maybe down where the congregation of the
Chinese were, it was used a little bit more. But, out of the villages, you know,
everybody could grow poppies, they knew how to extract the liquid from that,
or the moisture, so that they could have opium, and our...our new leader, called
the [Chinesephrase] (means “Lord of the Heavens,”) smoked it. And
he came to the hospital...when he’d come to the hospital for treatment,
we wouldn’t allow him to stay in the new hospital. He had to stay in the
old hospital, which was a rather run down place, and not appropriate for his
stature, but he realized that he smoked opium, that’s where he had to
be. But he had a...brother, was it? The [Chinese]...

HOWARD THOMAS: [faint, unclear response]

THOMAS: What?

HOWARD THOMAS: [Chinese]

THOMAS: Yes. Was he a brother?

HOWARD THOMAS: I don’t know. I guess he was.

THOMAS: He had...had some... I don’t know, but this happened before we
got there. And he’d been in the hospital and operated on. They took him
off the opium, he never went back to it, and he was cured of whatever he had
had wrong with him, and he was a great testimony for the effectiveness of being
taken off opium. I would say, depending on where they grew it, and there would
be a certain number of people who would use opium, yes.

HOWARD THOMAS: Sometimes they’d use it to put the baby to sleep, take
them out in the field and work.

THOMAS: Yes, keep the baby quiet, you know. But...but on the other division
of labor, anything that had to do with the women, I always did, because this
was appropriate. If....

ERICKSEN: Culturally.

THOMAS: Culturally. Yes. But I wouldn’t work much with the men, because,
again, that wasn’t appropriate. But the women and children, and...but
I could have language classes for both men and women, that was perfectly alright,
but anything physical, I didn’t attempt to do with the men.

HOWARD THOMAS: They asked us [unclear] about the vaccinating procedures yet?

THOMAS: No, they haven’t yet. When we went back, after the war, and went
to travel into our station, we took a lot of relief supplies with us. Church
World Services sent many things, thirty tons of stuff, in fact, we took with
us when we left the States. And we wanted to take some things back...we left
some in Thailand, we left some in Burma, and then the rest we took in. One thing
I wanted to take in was vaccines for smallpox. This is supposedly to be refrigerated,
but how can you travel ten days on horseback, and have it refrigerated? So we
had taken joints of bamboo, and had bored holes in on the sides, and filled
a lot of moss in the bottom, which we kept wet, and put the vaccine in that,
then more moss, and then, the man who was carrying it carried it on a bamboo
pole. We called it a “hop.” You could carry a load on each end of
it, but only a certain number of pounds. And this, waving back and forth on
the end of his pole, aerated it and kept it cool, and word would leak out, or
get ahead of us, that we’re coming with the vaccine. And we’d stop
at night, and before we had the horses unloaded, the loads off the horse and
camp made, people came and wanted the injection. And I would give...I would
vaccinate up until it was dark, and we had to put our lights on, and then they
wanted to go back home. In the morning, before we left the camp, and were ready
to start again, they were there, and we would...we would...we vaccinated, all
the way those ten days into our station.

HOWARD THOMAS: How many times did I help you?

THOMAS: I don’t know. But during the war, some...when the army had come
through, they had asked for vaccine, and the people still got smallpox, so we
don’t know what these other people had given them. But it certainly wasn’t
smallpox vaccine, and...but they trusted us. And we just inoculated right and
left. We had a system up at our station, too, that someone from the hospital
or someone who had a little medical training, would go out in the villages,
or in the mountains, he’d be gone, oh, maybe a month at a time, and he
would vaccinate, and take the person’s name, but he didn’t get any
money. He would go back in six months time, that was about the period of interval,
and if this person had a scar, he paid, but if there was no scar, he might have
been immune, you know, wouldn’t leave a scar, then the person didn’t
pay anything. But we called these inoculators, and they would buy the vaccine
from us. And anything they made on the...from it, then, that was all...that
was theirs. And oh, they were so grateful for this. They...they were eager to
have their children vaccinated, and we thought it was a very worthwhile thing.

ERICKSEN: You mentioned, in talking about vaccinating, that the people trusted
you.

THOMAS: Yeah.

ERICKSEN: How long did you find that it took for that trust to be built by
the individuals?

THOMAS: We can’t take all the credit for that, because, you see, they
had had missionaries there.

ERICKSEN: Sure.

THOMAS: And, although we were new, we had a senior missionary at the station
who was [unclear]. [The missionary was Marie Park.] And she sort of certified
us. And Mi-ling [sp?] Park (Mi-ling [sp?] means doctor) if Mi-Ling [sp?]...I
mean woman doctor, although she wasn’t, her husband was the doctor. If
Mi-Ling [sp?] certified us, it was all right. [pauses] I ought to tell you about
the cooperatives too.

ERICKSEN: Please do.

THOMAS: Thomas told you about our work with leprosy patients, and this one
colony (they don’t call them colonies anymore, because they don’t
isolate them like we did in those days) but this one colony was about three
kilometers from our house. They had fairly good land there, but it was a large
concentration of people, and they were...really didn’t have enough land
to support the population they had there. But anyway, they were getting along
pretty well with a little subsidy, but we wanted to make them a little more
self-sustaining, self-supporting, so we made this suggestion to the superintendent
of the colony, that if they raised the cotton and wanted to sell it to us, we
would buy it, and then we would give it back to them, give it back to them to
work. And when it was woven into cloth, they gave us half of what they got out
of this quantity of cotton. Then they could do whatever they wanted with theirs.
We were repaid, and they had...they could make some money on what they had to
sell, and they liked this very much. And so the...the container was...was thirty
pounds, we called it a [Chinese term] and it would already have the...still
have the seeds in it. They would...we would weigh this out, and give them the
basket of cotton to take home to work. The little machine they had for removing
the seeds was called an “Eeet”, and it was called that because the
sound it made when they turned the handle here, to take out the seeds, went
“Eeet, eeet, eeet, eeet,” (which I think was awfully cute). Then
they refined the cotton until they made...sort of made it into cloth. And out
of these thirty pounds, this [Chinese term], they got four pieces of cloth.
Now, they’re not a bale.... Not a bale, what do you call it?

HOWARD THOMAS: [unclear]

THOMAS: It was about a yard and a half in each one. It was called a [Chinese
term, sounds like “hum”] but there’s another...there’s
an English word, which I’m stymied for right now. They.... A bolt. It
wouldn’t be a bolt of cloth, but it...relatively speaking, it was. And
we had many Chinese caravans that came down through our station in the wintertime,
going into Burma, and carried all kinds of produce, and they were crazy to buy
this cloth, because it was good homespun, you know, and they would buy all they
could get, and take it back up north. So there was a ready market for this,
and the people were eager to be on our list to get the cloth. Now, we would
examine it to make sure that they weren’t doing slipshod work. But those
that did the good work, we continued to re-subsidize them again. We did this...what
else did we do this with? Cotton was the....

HOWARD THOMAS: Tobacco.

THOMAS: Hmm?

HOWARD THOMAS: Tobacco.

THOMAS: Oh, tobacco. And there was one colony Tom got started, of land that
was very good for growing tobacco. People came from all around to buy the tobacco,
so this colony, in no time at all, was self-sustaining. This one nearest us
grew marvelous pineapple, but they had to have a little something to feed the
kiddies that were...and we were the ones that furnished the money for them to
get started, and then did this on peanuts, they grew very good peanuts.

ERICKSEN: Was this something...system something you suggested to them, or how
did it fit in with their previously existing economic system?

THOMAS: They had so little to go on, they could never get enough ahead to get
started on it. And when they found that they really couldn’t lose on this,
they were very eager to be in on it. They knew what.... Oftentimes, they grew
extra rice, and would sell it, or they’d grow vegetables and sell them,
but it would just be a little handful of things they would take into market.
But very often, people in market would not buy from people with leprosy. They
were afraid. So we were the sort of middleman there that took away the stigma.
Oh, I can still see these people coming in and...and how excited they were to
be doing this.

HOWARD THOMAS: Well, we had...we had them making farm instruments, we gave
them the basic things to build with, making tiles for their roads....

THOMAS: Making the bricks for their houses.

HOWARD THOMAS: The bricks for their houses, and then mats.

THOMAS: Baskets.

HOWARD THOMAS: Baskets. We let them...this is all what came out of a need,
a identifed need in this culture which I have described for you and these people....
When you see a need, once an identification of that nature was made, we would
[unclear].

ERICKSEN: How long, in these programs...? You suggested it. How long would
it take for you to turn the administration of it over to the people?

THOMAS: I never wanted to work alone, even from the very beginning. I would
get somebody [coughs] who would identify with me, and sell that person on the
idea, then the two of us would work together. We got them starting on different
kinds of vegetables, with me working with my cook, and he was the head man in
the village, so he had great prestige. And he was eager to do things like we
did. So, carrots (which they didn’t know anything at all about), cabbage
they knew, and a form of celery they knew, but...and onions, and red peppers,
they had, but that was about the extent of the vegetables, and green beans.
But we would try all different kinds of things. We would get the seeds from
Burma, which were in the same zone, as it were, so that we knew the seeds were
tested for our kind of climate. And then, we would work with Poi Lee [sp?] the
cook, and he’d see how we’d fix it, and we’d say “Well,
don’t you want to take some of these home?” Now, we had to be very
careful in this, because if you’re only working with one person, the other
people in your house will get jealous. And so, he would take them home and try
them with his family, and they thought it was prestige thing because, here,
you know, Poi Lee [sp?] worked for the [Chinese term] and they eat these, and
they’re really not bad. But they had to make adjustments, sometimes, put
a little more red pepper in with them, can you imagine red pepper with carrots?
Not too bad. And, work on recipes which they could adapt, and use...using the
material that they had. And I would say some things took longer than others.
That they saw...could see immediate results, which just working in the cotton
was almost the...you know, they worked way into the evening with getting this
cotton ready for cloth. That was almost...there was almost an immediate result.
Changing a person’s palate or taste buds could go a little slower, course,
he loved any pie that we made, and he’d take some of that home, if we
didn’t want any...if we didn’t eat the crust or.... Tom doesn’t
eat the pie...the bottom crust ever. He’d take that home, I’d say
to Poi, “You know, don’t say that.”[?] He’d say “Oh,
I’m only taking it home for Chai,” which was his little boy, so
I could never say no. “Take it home.”

ERICKSEN: It sounds like the teamwork that you...you tried to establish worked
very well. Were there ever incidents where it didn’t work?

THOMAS: One never likes to dwell on failures. I’m trying to think of
an instance where....

HOWARD THOMAS: One of the things that the programs that we developed, and that
we were cooperating on were always the recommendation of this committee, so
it would be very difficult for her to go in one direction and me in another.
The only place where this could have happened was when we were on tours, and
judgement might... I remember the time that you and I had this argument about
whether you should straighten that woman’s broken arm or not.

THOMAS: Oh, yeah.

HOWARD THOMAS: So in a case like that, there might be disagreement, but that
was never very often. [pauses] She was a typical professional nurse, you didn’t
tell unless you were a doctor, [laughs, unclear].

THOMAS: I think we thought very carefully before we started anything. We almost
felt we had success before we started, but I’m awfully glad the things
that didn’t work have faded into insignificance, I’d much rather
dwell on the successful things. [laughs]

ERICKSEN: Okay.

THOMAS: I’d like to tell you how we got our supplies in there, if...do
we have time for that?

ERICKSEN: Sure.

THOMAS: As we told you, we had to travel all this distance on horseback, so
then our supplies went in on horseback too. And we would order supplies once
a year. The missionaries in Bangkok had told us when we go in, when we’re
in the first year, that we should not plan on living off the land the first
year. We had other adjustments to make, and we should do those, concentrate
on the things which we needed to for the work, so to take in everything we were
going to use the first year. This meant cinnamon, and clothes, and...and they
said we might be able to get salt, but they weren’t sure. Flour, butter,
we took in the margarine, and one missionary said, well she took in...she always
got the green coffee beans, and roasted them, and then ground them, so we got
a coffee grinder, we were out of coffee the first month, we didn’t take
in enough, and we bought by cases, and here I had been keeping house with the
little refrigerator under the stove...under the sink, and I bought a quarter
of a pound of butter at a time when I was here in the states, and to go over
there and buy supplies for a year, I...well, I was aghast. First, the amount
of money it was going to take, and then what to do. But the missionaries were
very helpful, and we only missed the mark on a few things. Every year, there
were some things we had to re-order. We always re-ordered flour and refined
sugar and coffee. We didn’t need to do tea, because we were in the tea...tea
plantation area. But a few little things that supplemented what we could buy
locally. So one year, then we’d either send the order to Bangkok or to
Rangoon. We always ordered three hundred pounds of flour, and it came in six
fifty-pound tins. They would solder the lids on, and they would fit very nicely
on the horses. So I said to Tom, “Wouldn’t it be nice to get one
can of whole wheat flour?” Because we had to make our own bread and so
on. And he said, “Yes.” And the order came, and of course, by the
time you opened up the last can to use, the weevils had been at it, and the
top layer was just bugs, so we’d have to sift this, and sun it, and so
on, but I think a lot of the nutrients were gone, I’m sure they were.
So the new order came in, and I was ready for a new can of flour, I opened it
up, and it was whole wheat, and I said, “Oh, goody, he sent us some whole
wheat.” But I needed white flour, so I opened the next one, and it was
whole wheat. And it turned out the three hundred pounds of flour were whole
wheat flour. I was making my own yeast out of hops that I had sent in, and I
didn’t have potatoes to make...use potato water to use with the hops,
so I used rice water, which was not really the best substitute, but that’s
all I had. And then whole wheat flour. It’s a wonder Tom didn’t
pack up and go home, because my bread would be about two inches...an inch-and-a-half
high, and heavy, and hard, but it made wonderful pie crusts, this whole wheat
flour, so we did have a few things that were not quite as agreeable as we’d
like them to be. Then we had ordered, of course, the first time a course of...can
of...sorry, a case of peaches and a case of pears and a case of this, and a
case of that. And I got so chintzy [thrifty], I wouldn’t use them very
often, because by this time, we were loving what we could get up there, although
it’d be very seasonal. And by the time we went out for that last mission
meeting, I still had some of the original case of some of this...this fruit.
But we thought it would be kind of nice to take in some raspberries. I’d
see all these things on the shelf in the store in Bangkok, you know, so I thought,
“Yes, I’ll take in some raspberries.” But the constant jiggling
on the horses, we had seeds, and we had juice. [laughs] no...no berries at all.
[laughs] So that would be a little disappointment. The merchants would always
include a [Chinese term, sounds like “kamshaw’] and that’s...it
would be ordered for the dry season, because that’s the only time the
horses could bring it in. But he always included a little extra present for
us. And there’d be a fig pudding, something like that, you know, which
was a treat, and we always eagerly looked for these little presents. Course,
it was a big order, several hundred dollars in those...at a time in those days,
plus the shipping in, which was expensive. [pauses, tape recorder turned off
and on]

ERICKSEN: Having worked with a denominational mission, I...I know, your husband
mentioned that you weren’t...there weren’t other missionaries in
close to where you were. What was the perception of the missionaries in the
Presbyterian church, of let’s say, other denominational missions, or non-denominational
missions?

THOMAS: You mean in our particular area? Because there was a....

ERICKSEN: Over in China.

THOMAS: The only other people we had any contact with were some Pentecostal
missionaries who lived in [Chinese name, sounds like “Zumao”] which
was six day’s travel by horse, or being carried, pardon me, north of us,
and I think when they came down and passed through our place, they were quite
surprised that we had things as plush as they were. I think they lived much
more simply, although, the one single missionary up there had a wonderful set
of dental tools. She could extract teeth, and have the best tools to do it with,
because.... Well, she didn’t do any fillings. I don’t think she
did. Just something temporary. But I think on the whole, they lived much more
simply than we did. We certainly didn’t live lavishly. We did have our
pressure lamps, and we had the food that we could have sent in, and that sort
of thing, but some of the missionaries in Thailand said to me, “We really
don’t think you should have any differential in allowance for being up
there, because you have no place to spend it.”

ERICKSEN: What’s the differential?

THOMAS: Well, we got a little bit more in salary. But...yes, we couldn’t
spend it there, but we were so devoid of things while we were there that when
we did come out (they always said “come out”)....

HOWARD THOMAS: We had a master.... Woody was the cabinet maker. He made a lot
of furniture.

THOMAS: Yes. And we had to bring in all our gas...oil for our lamps and things
like that, which was of course, our own expense. But we felt so deprived when
we’d go out and see so many things that we could get, that we spent quite
lavishly, and what we had saved up during the time we were there went very quickly.

HOWARD THOMAS: I think I sense the question you’re after is how did they
perceive the Baptist versus the Presbyterian versus the Roman Catholic.

THOMAS: Oh.

HOWARD THOMAS: That sort of thing. That existed in Burma. The Bukers [perhaps
the Raymond Bukers, see Billy Graham Center Archives Collection 262] would know.
[unclear]

THOMAS: I think our...the people up our way, that stayed there, didn’t
think of this, but we always had a group of people that had to travel with us.
They had to be the cook, always two horse boys, well, there was a horse boy
for every five horses, and the carriers, things that you couldn’t put
on an animal, like your cooking utensils, you know, they just don’t fit
on the side of an animal. And so these people would...would walk too, and, oh,
there might be eight or ten people walking. We called them carriers or helpers.
And then we get down into Burma, and they see some things that are different,
for instance, immersion...immersion, and the Buker twins, these very wonderful
people, Baptist missionaries down there, would have a joke every once in a while,
and after we’d come back from Bangkok, one of them would say, “Well,
we took your men to...your men went to church with us Sunday, and we had a baptism.”
And we’d say, “We don’t do that up in [name unclear]. How
come?” And then the Bukers would say to us, “Well, of course, this
is the right way you know.” And he wouldn’t have said this at all,
but they would see there was a difference, and I don’t think anyone ever
asked us for immersion. Do you remember that, Tom? But they would be baptized
in church when they became Christians.

HOWARD THOMAS: In the Roman Catholic church, they did.

THOMAS: Yes, but I don’t think our men really got....

HOWARD THOMAS: [unclear]

THOMAS: Yes, but I...the men that traveled down with us, I don’t think
would get that close to the Catholics to wonder about. They...it’s like
being in a place where there’s only one...one church. But only the went
out, traveled with us would...would notice any difference. And then in an ordinary
preaching service, I don’t think they noticed any difference.

HOWARD THOMAS: Do you know Ray Buker, who...well...?

ERICKSEN: Yes. We’ve interviewed him. [BGC Archives Collection 262]

HOWARD THOMAS: Oh, well....

THOMAS: This would be his father.

HOWARD THOMAS: We’re talking about his father. He’s the one that
worked at the Baptist headquarters there, alright. Well, his dad was a twin
brother, he was a little before me and he was the first man to [unclear]. His
brother was a doctor before he was a minister.

THOMAS: They both would have been doctors.

HOWARD THOMAS: But those two guys were really big. They were really good.

THOMAS: We always felt they held a lifeline up for us up in our station. When
we had a cholera epidemic, and our doctor didn’t have anything with which
to treat them, except [unclear] I mean, as a preventive, and he...we sent a
runner down. Now, our runner would go in about half the time that a car...that
we would travel, because he’d have no load, you see, and he could go very
fast, where we might travel ten to fifteen miles a day, he’d travel fifteen
to twenty. And they cleaned out everything they had down there that they thought
would help us. They said, “We can get it again, but you need it now.”
And sent things back to us.

HOWARD THOMAS: [unclear]

THOMAS: Yes. They...they were magnificent people, and we had a great warmth
for them. We loved going visiting them.

ERICKSEN: As you look back on your years in China, was there anything from
your...your education at Nyack or at Wheaton that you found especially helpful?

THOMAS: Well, I think, primarily, all my Bible training was helpful. I’m
trying to think of...if it’s helped me to be simplistic in my methods,
and I think it all had...they all had a bearing....

HOWARD THOMAS: Mason must have helped you.

THOMAS: David Mason. I’ve already spoken about him. I think the Nyack
training, probably more so than the Wheaton, because at Nyack, it was practically
all geared to religion, or Biblical studies, some things that weren’t
specifically, like my French, and so on, but I think there was that great emphasis
on spiritual things, and I think they...that emphasis was very helpful. And
I think in the C&MA [Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination] there
was in those days, a tendency to be less elaborate in presentation, I think
you had a very simple way of presenting things, which would be more effective
than...coming down to their level, in other words. I had some courses at Nyack
which I think were very helpful in...like giving chart talks, and demonstrations,
but always with a Biblical emphasis. [pause] And yet, certainly Wheaton had
an influence on me. As you can see, I’m a loyal Wheatonite.

ERICKSEN: Well, I’m not sure that’s the...the note to end on, but...

THOMAS: [laughs]

ERICKSEN: ...I think we’ve covered our material, so thank you very much
for the interview.